Neurology has failed to notice our most comprehensive sensory faculty
Oops.
In my studies of the nervous system these days, particularly when I am doing research (as opposed to working clinically), I move between the roles of a detective and a translator. A detective because I find myself hunting down obscure bits of information, often following a hunch that something has been overlooked. A translator because whenever I find a relevant journal article, I have to translate the word salad of contemporary brain-centric neuroscience into the language of Autonomics so that it makes sense.
I have stated here, and everywhere in fact that I am capable of stating it, that the foundations of neurology are replete with structural errors, resulting from
worldview: during the era in which modern neuroscience was established (and enduring yet to this day) its early cartographers were under the sway of a brain-centric bias. If you identify with thinking (Cartesian assertion: I think, therefore I am), you identity self with the organ that produces thoughts in words and images, namely the brain. If this is your worldview, you believe that neurological structures of primary importance are located in the brain and this is what you study
the hegemony of visuality: the microscope is an extension of vision. We believe that what we are seeing (anatomy) explains what is happening in the neurology we are looking at (physiology). It does not. (This error has led us to foundational mis-partitioning and consequent mis-naming of neurological systems.)
necrotic anatomy: we understand the nervous system from dissecting corpses. Like trees that are dead whose leaves fall off, corpses lose the finest structure of the smallest nerve pathways: these are ultra-fine and invisible to the human eye (they are 1/3500th of an inch thick) and the receptors in which they terminate.
collusion: the limitations on optical acuity combine with the neurology (necrology?) of corpses to prevent us from seeing (and recognizing they exist) this finest structure. This results in us believing the Autonomic Nervous System looks like an Oak in winter rather than an Oak in summer. We understand the ANS as a system of telephone wires, rather than a fine mist suffusing the interior of the body1
You have been taught your neurology looks like this:
When that is true only if you are dead. When you are alive, it looks like this:
These biases and perceptual failures have caused us to fail to notice the largest and most complex multi-modal sensing organs of the body, which are interoceptive. Their neural structure resembles the inverted summer oak just above this paragraph. The Autonomic Nervous System is an intero-sensing apparatus. It is our largest most complete sensory faculty, and modern neuroscience has failed to notice that it exists at all. I want you to be totally astonished by this.
This intero-sensing apparatus is the neural architecture of the mindbody connection: the system that allows you to answer the question: How do I feel?
Modern neuroscience has entirely failed to register the existence of the neural architecture that permits you to answer that question.
While all of your extero-senses are routinely examined from the time you are born– your vision, hearing, smell, taste, and sense of touch have been examined since you were an infant in the hands of your first pediatrician– the existence of the largest interoceptive sensing systems in your body have developed uncommented upon for your entire life.
Because we categorically fail to notice that they exist, we also categorically fail to measure them, which means that we categorically fail to register when and if they are developing sub-optimally. This is a very serious problem, because accurate interoception is the neurological substrate for effective sensory, affective, and cognitive processes.
Let me say that in plain language. If you cannot feel yourself from inside accurately (the most basic foundation layer of this would be sensing when you have to pee, poop, when you are hungry, when you are cold, etc.), all of the higher order processes that result from these foundation inputs are compromised. If I cannot feel myself inwardly, if I cannot distinguish interoceptively between what feels good and not good, what I want to move toward and what I want to move away from, I cannot read social cues effectively and I cannot form satisfying and reciprocal social relationships. These interoceptive deficits, which then cascade into emotional and relational impairments, subsequently compromise the strata for effective cognition.
So, ironically, we live in a world of cognitive supremacy, which has failed to notice that it is not even checking for the accurate calibration of the autonomic faculties that support clear thinking. So…that’s ironic.
Furthermore, these interoceptive sensing systems can be compromised because of organic dysfunction (e.g., some physiological or anatomical problem), or they can be functionally compromised by trauma. Shutdown states (what Polyvagal Theory calls dorsal vagal) suffuse the body with endogenous opioids, which blockade interoceptive interneuron clusters (ganglia, plexes) and down-regulate interoception. So a person can conceivably experience compromised interoception because there is organic neurological dysfunction, or because a lifethreat response in the Autonomic Nervous System has down-regulated it. For most people (since none of your medical providers check this anyway) the distinction might not matter– you are impaired either way– yet since the first can be very difficult to fix and the second is eminently addressable, I would think most people would wish to know the difference.
These systems also feed the vestibular and ocular systems to generate proprioception, which is not merely our experience of our bodies in space, but space around our bodies, so their compromise also cascades into movement deficits of balance and coordination. If interoception is compromised, you get clumsy. If we cannot feel our bodies from the inside, our ability to feel our bodies in space, and feel space around our becomes becomes compromised.
While this is clearly an anatomical problem (bad neurological anatomy maps), we could argue that at its roots is an epistemological problem. Because what is faulty here, in the intellectual history of the discipline, has to do with how we construct anatomical, and subsequently medical knowledge. It has to do with how we know what we know. It has to do with what mechanisms of knowledge production were validated by the ‘empirical’ scientific system of the day. And this is ultimately a question of cultural context.
The anatomical maps (and make no mistake, anatomy is a cartographic enterprise) of the day were fashioned based on a certain mode and method of inquiry. Due to the cultural zeitgeist at the time– I think therefore I am, vision is a reliable method for apprehending reality, etc., these foundation distortions (worldview, hegemony of visuality, necrotic anatomy, collusion) were structured in at the origin of the discipline. Errors in the foundation of a building are really hard to change, because you built the building on top of them. They cascade forward. If you relied on bad maps as inputs for your good maps, your good maps become bad maps. You simply cannot build an accurate map if you are getting inputs from inaccurate maps.
Neurological maps that are derivative of inaccurate foundation maps of neurology are inaccurate.
You can, however, possibly imagine a different disciplinary trajectory. Imagine, for a moment, the neuroscience that might develop in a society that recognized that interoception was our largest sensory faculty, one to which the entire body was in service. If this was recognized, you might imagine a society where, from an early age, children were trained to point attention at their inner landscapes.
Lest you imagine that we’d have to invent this training from scratch, there is a name for these technologies. They are called mindful awareness. There are, as you might imagine, entire lineages of practice that train them. One of their most foundational practices is the bodyscan.
In a bodyscan, we sustain and direct attention inwardly, in systematic ways, to sensation in the body. Another way of saying this is that we give primacy to interoceptive sensing.
It is not impossible to imagine that a person who has been trained in these embodied and interoceptive ways of knowing might be able to, with sufficient guidance, learn to trace their inward neurology, particularly if they were offered an accurate autonomic map.
It is not impossible to imagine that such an inward cartographer might, if their tracking was sufficiently calibrated, be able to help us answer, from the inside out, questions about the functional and physiological structure of our neurology, in vivo, by approaching it from an entirely different perspective.
It would then be interesting to discover whether or not they existed in a society capable of giving credence to such ways of knowing. You can imagine, I suppose, that the proof might be in whether or not the maps they generated had deeper clinical and explanatory power.
In January 2025, I begin serially publishing here chapters from my forthcoming book Hearth Science: Phenomenology of an Embodied Neuroscience. The above essay is adapted from this project. If you’d like to read it as it is produced, and be able to comment upon it, which helps us make it better, become a full subscriber to this Substack.
The visual you have of this is significant. You might also think of it as cotton candy spun through your viscera, or cobwebs woven across and through it all. The primary thing to understand is the density and fineness of the weave.
Oops. :)